Sunday Short: Wolf like Me by Antonia Hayes

My inevitable downfall was the sun, the trigger of an intense flare of illness. My friend Bella and I had gone on a holiday to the beach, where we sat on the hot sand all day and read Doris Lessing, and lay out on cheap inflatable lilos tied to a buoy, floating under the Mediterranean sun. We jumped off rugged clay cliffs into the sea, sipped on pineapple-flavoured cocktails, laughed and danced to Europop. After a week our skin was dusky and our hair fell in saltwater waves. But I came home with a fever, my limbs aching, and covered in a violet shock of bruises. One leg was indigo and covered in welts. In the days following the holiday, my body was so heavy that I couldn’t get out of bed for almost a week, and so sore that, incapable of standing up, I vomited in my sheets and lay in a pool of my own sick for several hours until I could move.

There seems to be a surge of writing about illness lately, and it's been interesting to both be privy to it and to write about it myself. 'Wolf like Me' by Antonia Hayes is definitely one of the better pieces I've read, tracing her diagnosis of Lupus in beautifully poetic prose,while writing about something which is, well, not exactly beautiful. She captures the ugliness of illness, the insecurity of something incurable, and the anxiety that accompanies knowing something's wrong without knowing exactly what that is. It's a pretty great piece of writing.  

You can read 'Wolf like Me' over on the Meanjin website.